Books: Yukon Honeymoon

WE LIVE IN ALASKA—Constance Helmericks—Little, Brown ($3).

When seven-year-old Connie was asked what she was going to be when she grew up, she answered: “Explorer.” Later, at the University of Arizona in 1941, she met, and later married, adventurous, 23-year-old Bud Helmericks, an Arizona hunter who could handle a boat as smartly as he could bring down a wild duck. He wanted his new wife to become “a killer of bears.” One hour after their wedding, Bud and Connie boarded a ship for Alaska, bent on a canoe trip down the Yukon, third longest river in North America.

We Live in Alaska is Connie’s lively and well-told tale of their honeymoon.

Queen Beaver and Beans. At Anchor age, Bud got a job as a construction worker; in his spare time built the Queen Beaver, a 19-ft. canoe made of Sitka spruce and canvas. In July 1942 they shipped the Queen north to Fairbanks, loaded her with $93 worth of canned foods and sacks of beans and flour, pushed off down the Yukon’s Tanana tributary. The great river, first explored by Russians and men of the Hudson’s Bay Company, rises in Canada’s Yukon Territory and flows north west 2,300 miles into the Bering Sea. Bud and Connie planned to course down to within 200 miles of its delta.

But the Helmericks soon found that the surly Yukon was no highway of ro mance. It carried “the silt of half a continent,” and floating forests of trees and driftwood were a daily threat to the frail Queen Beaver. Arctic breezes whipped up icy waves that drenched the honeymooners to their skins. When they spent the night on a river island their down-lined sleeping bags were soon sodden with stagnant water.

The canned food ran out. Bud and Connie lived off fish, wild geese, snipe and ptarmigan—when they could get them. They spent whole days in icy water holes, waiting for the wary game. Once Bud shot a moose, but Connie never achieved his ambition for her. Friendly natives gave them an occasional bite of “Eskimo ice cream” (blueberries, snow, and seal oil). Sometimes they had so little to eat that they lost all desire for food and meandered down the river “dizzier than sick cats,” sipping hot tea in the driving rain.

Mosquitoes and Shrews. As soon as they touched shore, clouds of mosquitoes descended on them, made their faces swell up like footballs. Years before, they were told, Alaskan Indians who captured white men simply tied their victims naked to trees, let the mosquitoes finish them. Once when Connie clapped her husband on the back she counted 100 squashed mosquitoes on her palm. They could understand why mosquitoes were considered “the most serious single obstacle . . . in the way of man’s subjugation of the North.”

When they took refuge in riverside cabins, the night was made hideous by the “howls, wails and shrieks” of the Yukon’s “coal-eyed, shark-faced shrews”—three-inch rodents which eagerly devoured one another. Natives told the appalled young couple about the man who had died in his cabin and not been found for seven months. Rescuers who lifted his body found it “as light as ashes. The shrews had gone in from the cheeks and down inside, hollowing all out. . . .”

Often the Helmericks stopped over at river villages, visited with the lonely white men & women of the U.S.-Indian Service.

The Indians migrated so freely that sometimes when the Helmericks stopped at what the map marked as a large settlement they found only a few bare poles.

Sometimes new settlements, unmarked on the maps, had burgeoned into large communities in only two or three years.

As autumn drew near the Alaskan sun rose and set in ever-narrowing circles (it was never overhead). Bud and Connie encased themselves in long woolen under wear, never took it off, never washed.

(Later, back in civilization, hairdressers were amazed by Connie’s hair; unwashed for nearly half a year, it had become gleaming and entirely dandruff-free.) The last 100 miles was a race against time: as they neared the Bering Sea the ice began to creep up on them from the Yukon’s freezing banks. In late September they left the river, and Indians guided the frail canoe through the last miles of turgid swampland, to the town of Bethel.

From there a plane carried the honeymooners safely back to Fairbanks.

“The Yukon,” the Helmericks conclude.

“is going backward rather than forward.”

Thirty years ago its river towns teemed with activity. “Today the trails are over grown, the roadhouses are closed, and the telephone wires down. . . . The men along the Yukon completely lack worldly ambition.”